Most electronic documents, i.e., digital images, to be printed or output on a particular device include multiple objects, such as text, photos, graphics and the like. Many electronic documents are a composite of other smaller documents and objects. For example, photographic objects might be pasted into a largely text document at different locations. Color graphic objects and monochrome image objects might occur on the same page. Individual objects of an electronic document that are intended to match in color may be represented in a variety of color spaces, a situation which might arise because those elements are derived from prior documents of differing origins. This situation will not be immediately apparent to the user, because the colors of the objects appear to match on the visual display. The color mismatch is typically only detectable when the electronic document is printed using a digital printing apparatus such as xerographic printing.
One problem arises when sophisticated color transformation is involved, such that different color definitions for the same color take different color transformation paths. For example, if one object's color is specified in sRGB, and another object's color specified in SWOP (Specifications for Web Offset Publications) CMYK, the color processing needed to produce the device CMYK for the specific marking process may produce a different device CMYK value for the two objects. This might be due to differing black generation/black preservation strategies, even if the two objects would have matched exactly on a SWOP press (where no conversion of the SWOP CMYK would have been necessary). Another problem arises when more sophisticated color transformation is involved, such that non-color differences in the source (e.g., differing object type) cause the objects to take different color transformation paths. One instance of this is the Xerox Corporation DocuSP color DFE (digital front end) that can assign different ICC rendering intents to different object types having the same nominal color. For example, by default text might be assigned a “Saturation” rendering intent, while graphics might be assigned a “Relative Colorimetric” rendering intent. Especially for colors near the edge or outside the printer's color gamut, the processing of the source color may produce visibly different results.
Application Ser. No. 11/178,129 discloses a system for color match verification and correction that solves many color mismatch problems in order to create printed output documents having color matched objects as intended by the original image data, even though different color definitions are used for the same color objects in the image data.
A difficult color match problem occurs when a raster image object (e.g., a bitmap or a bytemap or the like), such as a digital photograph, a scanned image or a computer-generated image, is bordered, surrounded or touched by a solid color graphics object that might be intended to match the color along an edge of the raster image object or that might be intentionally mismatched with the color along an edge of the raster image object to provide a contrasting border. This problem is complicated by the fact that the raster image object might have a color variance along its edge(s) that border(s) the color graphics object. The present application is intended to provide input to the method/apparatus of Ser. No. 11/178,129 to allow for color match between a raster object and a color graphics object, if color match was originally intended.